The captain of the ill-fated Italian cruise liner Costa Concordia has told the court that when he noticed his ship was heading towards rocks he gave the order to his Indonesian helmsman to steer left.

Francesco Schettino said at his manslaughter trial on Monday that the helmsman mistakenly turned the ship to the right.

He said if the error had not been made the ship would not have hit rocks off the Tuscan island of Giglio and capsized in January last year, resulting in the deaths of 32 people.

"If there had not been this mistake, in not positioning the rudder to the left ... there would not have been this impact," Schettino said.

The argument was rejected by the head of the expert committee, Giuseppe Cavo Dragone, who said that the 13-second delay before the ship ran aground appeared to be irrelevant.

"The ship would have hit the rocks in any case," he said.

Schettino, who has been in constant attendance at the hearings, faces multiple charges including manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and abandoning ship.

He has been chatting readily with journalists in the courtroom bar and talking often on television, has admitted that he bears responsibility for the accident as the ship's captain.

But he says that he is not the only person to blame and wants the vessel to be examined for evidence of possible technical faults that may have contributed to the deaths during the desperate night-time evacuation of the ship.

With global media interest, the trial, in the Tuscan town of Grosseto, is being held in a specially adapted theatre.

It reopened a week after the operation to raise the wreck of the Concordia opened the way for a search for clues on what caused the accident.

As well as the role of the helmsman, the expert witnesses have been looking at faults with emergency generators which they said had not functioned, although there was no explanation why.

"We think it is strange to have investigated a ship of this size without even having stepped onboard," said Francesco Pepe, one of Schettino's legal team.

"We hope the judges decide it is right to go and carry out a series of tests on the ship."

The 290-metre-long, 114,500-ton vessel, now sits two thirds submerged on specially constructed platforms just off Giglio while salvage crews prepare for it to be towed away and broken up next year.

Underwater robots have resumed the search for the missing bodies of two victims, but before engineers can start work on refloating the wreck, prosecutors want to examine it for more evidence about what happened on the night it sank.

"We think that this ship had things that did not work including the alarms and communication, and when the passengers were onboard this series of things did not work properly," said Alessandra Guarini, a lawyer for one of the passengers.

"We hope tests carried out, will answer our questions; Why was a ship of this kind unable to save all the passengers onboard?"

We accompany the Sharia police on a nightly patrol in Aceh where the strict Islamic code increasingly governs every facet of life and people are caned for things that are commonplace in the west, like drinking alcohol, gambling and adultery.